So here we were in 1943 finally living in our own little house in East Ham, London E6. The upstairs flat had been vacated and we had the house to ourselves. Unfortunately Dad immediately upset Mum by offering the rooms to a friend and his pregnant wife. They took up residence straight away. We probably needed the money.
However, this arrangement didn't last long as they had to share the kitchen. Mum fell out with the young girl when she found she was using one of our saucepans first to boil her husbands underpants, then to make his porridge. They soon got their marching orders!
The time came when I had to start school. Mum took me on the first day to Altmore Avenue Infant School and shoved me through the iron gate into the playground. That was it. Thereafter I had to make my own way there and back; a distance of about a quarter of a mile. My first teacher's name was Miss McGrath and my best friend was Roger Banks, who always wore a black beret and a rather posh fawn overcoat. Roger taught me how to play Kiss-chase and always work it so that you caught a girl right behind the brick air-raid shelter at one end of the playground. Don't ask me how I can remember these details from over sixty years ago when today I can't remember where I left my glasses.
By now my baby brother Pete was a year old and we had spread our meagre possessions to the upper part of the house. I finally had my own bedroom, the "box-room", the smallest room in the house, barely big enough for a single bed, a chair and a small built-in wardrobe that looked more like a shed!
We also could now use the bathroom instead of the old galvanised tin bathtub that hung on the wall in the "conservatory" and which we brought to the kitchen floor and filled with kettles of water and all shared every Friday night, whether we needed a bath or not!
The bathroom had an ugly old gas Geyser over the bath. When our Friday night bathing ritual switched upstairs, Dad would light the geyser with a long taper made of folded newspaper through a square hole in the front.
As the gas caught, there would be a bang, a whoosh!, and flames would shoot out and singe the hairs on the back of Dad's hand if he didn't pull it away quick enough.
The smoke and smell of the fumes spread through the house as hot water gushed into the bath. We thought we were living in luxury!
Wugamumftaga
I hope you keep a copy of all these posts somewhere!
My daughter wanted her school speech competition piece to be about her Grandma. I therefore sat down with my Mum-in-Law last night and she dictated a precis of her life story to me over the phone. She was a West London girl!
She is quite ill now so it was a hard thing for her to do, but I am really pleased to have it on paper so that we don't forget bits in years to come.
I only wish we had a record of more of the anecdotes!